A Hamptons Christmas

by James Brady

  Well, if you read the tabloids and tune in occasionally to Entertainment Tonight or the Geraldo show, you know about the twenty-four-hour firefight that ensued.

  January was swiftly bearing down on us, a new year, a brand-new century, a fresh millennium, and more to the point, a return ticket on the Concorde to Paris and Emma’s convent school beckoning beyond the Alps. If we—Alix, my father, and I—were ever to accomplish a single constructive act on behalf of our little girl lost, it was now. The problem was, both Nicole and Dick were threatening a return to Manhattan or other parts before a fresh blizzard buried eastern Long Island, closed down the airports, and cut the roads and railroads in between. Nicole and Count Vlad wanted to get out simply because they were bored; Dick Driver had the legitimate excuse of needing to appeal a Federal Aviation Administration injunction against his skyscraper. Left behind, in the “boring” and soon-to-be-snowbound Hamptons, to keep an eye on young Emma and Nosey Parkers like us, would be Mr. and Mrs. Driver’s private eyes, and their respective PR counsels. Just how, if ever, were we going to get Nicole and Dick and their only child on the same damned page?

  In consequence of trying to answer that question, we would have our own bloodless version of a “gunfight at the OK corral,” featuring Dick versus Nicole, Sister Infanta versus Lefty Odets, Peggy Siegal versus Howard Rubenstein, and a ten-year-old girl in the middle. Before it was over, even Jesse and the Shinnecocks, merchant banker Henry Rousselot, Park Avenue lawyer Bryan Webb, as well as Peanuts Murphy and the Bonac Boys, would be involved. As Chief Maine put it, “It would of done credit to the Earps and the Clantons.” Though there were a few frayed and hanging threads still to be tidied up.

  My father, the Episcopalian, blamed Rome. “That Papal Nuncio they sent out here to check out Sister Infanta. He seems to be conducting a foreign policy all his own. Whatever happened to the separation of Church and State?”

  The Admiral tended to exaggerate when it came to Catholic bashing. But on this, he did seem to have a point.

  Even on the marginal question of whether a visiting Catholic prelate should be meeting with a minor émigré group such as Professor Wamba dia Wamba’s. The two men had a cocktail at Nick & Toni’s, but Wamba came away without anything like official recognition of the Congolese government in exile.

  “De facto recognition, my dear Wamba,” said the Nuncio, “must depend on the willingness of your People’s Popular Front to guarantee freedom of action for our missionaries in the field. Shooting priests and raping nuns just isn’t the way to go, old chap, I suggest to you in all sincerity.”

  “You have my word, Nuncio.”

  “Then, my good fellow, count on my conveying your assurances to the appropriate figures in Rome.”

  Less successful was the Papal Nuncio’s brief meeting (this time the drinks were at Della Femina’s on North Main Street) with Count Vlad.

  “Transylvania,” the count began, “can’t be extending friendship hands to the Church, I swear to Gott, thanks to Romanian bastards.”

  “But it would be such a decent gesture on your part,” the Nuncio persisted, “and go a long way toward convincing other nations to look favorably on an independent Transylvania.”

  The Impaler shook his handsome head.

  “Us Transylvanians is, ourselves, der victims, Gott knows, Bishop. An oppressor state is Romania, everybody could tell you dat. But I swear to Gott, the minute dey put my own family on der throne of a free Transylvania, recognition of duh Vatican will be der first business. Dat first morning I put on duh crown, you got my vote. But don’t hold no breath, Nuncio. Dem Romanians is ruffians. Worser den Turks. Don’t give nothing up for free. Dey like owning Transylvania!”

  “My God!” the Nuncio thought to himself. He was too polite to say, “These people are worse than the Congolese.” But at least the Transylvanians didn’t shoot, or not at priests. Too busy shooting one other. He and Count Vlad wrestled for the drinks check (the Impaler permitted the priest to get it).

  Sister Maria Infanta took advantage of these distractions to resign the Nicole account and departed by hired car for Manhattan to take a meeting at Michael’s restaurant on West Fifty-fifth with Binky Urban, the powerful ICM literary agent. Hucko’s miraculous return, after a month in the north Atlantic, had deeply impressed Binky (who doesn’t impress easily, I assure you). Perhaps the nun’s prayers and a Russian trawler were pure coincidence. But America was hungry for heroics, and best-sellers had been conjured up from less, so that a book deal was in the works.

  Was Sister really the heiress apparent to Mother Teresa’s charitable mantle? If so, the “Bride of Christ’s” thoughts, favorite prayers and hymns, and pithy sayings might well sell in a handsome trade paperback as interpreted and translated into readable, colloquial English by a marquee name writer. No one was quite sure if the idea would fly, but they were already talking TV movies and Internet Web sites. Also a very interested, though somewhat uneasy, party, George Plimpton, who’d been taking down Sister Infanta de Castille’s every word for yet another of his oral histories.

  “I admit,” George told chums at the Maidstone, “she gets off some wonderful lines. But to segue from that to her being the next Mother Teresa, well, it’s a reach. For one thing, she’s a poseur. Not even a genuine nun.”

  “Oh, hell, George!” one club member protested, knocking back a gin, “the woman tells a good story. What does it matter if she’s taken vows? A bit racier if she hasn’t, eh? Is there a former husband in the murky background somewhere? A discarded lover or two?”

  There was that, Plimpton agreed.

  Lefty Odets had also decamped, hardly in triumph and not at all in good odor with his client Dick Driver. But damned glad to be off the assignment. “I ain’t tackling Rome,” he informed colleagues. “And this woman, Sister Infanta, you don’t mess with her.” Odets instead was busily phoning Imus’s producer Bernard Mc-Guirk, desperate to book himself on the show and get across his version of events in the Hamptons before Driver did, only to be told:

  “Bo Dietl was on last Thursday. Imus says enough cops for a while.”

  But it was Sis Marley who dominated the scene as New Year’s Eve approached.

  Summoned urgently by E-mail and cell phone, we convened at her house at the marina about ten one morning: the Admiral, Alix, the kid, Jesse Maine, both Nicole and Dick Driver (she accompanied by the Impaler, Dick alone and looking rather naked without Miss Lithuania), Peanuts Murphy and several Bonac Boys, restored to Sis’s good graces, and a distinguished-looking gentleman, about my father’s age, whom I’d met before. The Drivers looked especially uneasy, their departures for Manhattan abruptly canceled at the last moment.

  “All right, boys,” Sis began, calling the meeting to order, “this gent is Mr. Rousselot, who’s the biggest banker around since David Rockefeller or Felix Rohatyn and just as smart, too. Henry Rousselot, chairman of Rousselot Frères, the finest merchant bankers this side of Threadneedle Street.”

  My father knew Henry Rousselot pretty well (Rousselot Frères were the Admiral’s own private bankers) and nodded vigorous agreement as the banker got into it. Didn’t take long, either. Addressing Sis first, thanking her for the invitation, then Emma Driver, as his client, he got swiftly to her parents, opening his case with an indictment as chill as anything old Judge Welch ever handed down when assailing Senator Joe McCarthy on Capitol Hill and over nationwide television, back in the fifties:

  “Mr. Driver, Ms. Driver, you may wish to consult your respective attorneys regarding what I’m about to say, but considering your less-than-pleasant record of recent litigation, I’d not recommend it. For more than half Miss Emma’s life, you two have treated your only child as a volleyball, batting her back and forth across the net of your own egos and ambitions, and I think you ought to be ashamed of yourselves. Though, as Emma’s banker, it’s not my role to deliver lectures, but to handle her money.”

  He paused to let that sink in, then went on.

  “When Miss
Emma Driver was born some ten years ago, her father was still Jacob Marley’s protégé, his junior partner, in some ways his surrogate son, succeeding, if never actually replacing, the boy killed on the Sag Harbor road trying to avoid a deer. Having no other close relatives, save his sister, who had resources of her own, Jake decided to create a little trust fund for Emma Driver that would provide for her education. She was an appealing child, and Jake still liked her father, was amused by her mother, and wanted to do something for the girl. And for them. But instead of putting in a few dollars, he bought stock. Funded the trust with stock, from the third or fourth week of Emma Driver’s young life. He chose the stock, a curious new company he rather fancied, but left it to me to manage the shares as executive trustee. Sis Marley and Jake himself were the other trustees, along with an estates-andtrusts lawyer named Bryan Webb, a distinguished member, incidentally, of your Maidstone Club, who is here today, having braved the roads to drive out from his Park Avenue offices.

  “Mr. Bryan Webb.”

  Webb—who had gone to Williams College, affected bow ties, and did a very good impersonation of Charles Osgood—smiled warmly at Emma, thinly at her parents, nodded to the rest of us, and sat down again without wasting a word.

  I could see Nicole nattering at the Impaler under her breath and Dick fidgeting impatiently. He had a full schedule; what was all this about? When would this dry-as-dust banker get to the damned point?

  Emma was the one Driver who seemed interested. But then, it was her money, wasn’t it?

  Rousselot now resumed, got to “the damned point.” Which the banker’s “dry-as-dust” accounting made even more impressive.

  “The stock Mr. Marley purchased ten years ago in trust for Emma Driver was issued by a promising little Seattle firm headed by two young men named Allen and Gates. Their company was called Microsoft, and very few Americans had ever heard of it and even fewer knew just what it did or expected to do. A year later, on young Emma’s first birthday, Jacob Marley bought more Microsoft. The market was down that year and he bought cheap. Picking up more shares because the price was lower but investing about the same amount of actual money. Over the next five or six years, depending on the Dow and on his own mood, Jake continued to buy Microsoft and to place the shares in trust for Emma Driver. The stock split. Split again. Split once more. And Emma Driver got richer. On paper, of course.

  “Even though, sadly, Jake Marley and his protégé, Emma’s father, Richard Driver, had by now become estranged.”

  When he dropped his voice and paused after that, you didn’t hear a sound in Sis Marley’s living room. Rousselot resumed:

  “After his death, as per his wishes, Sis continued the annual contribution of Microsoft stock. The birthday cards, the little notes from Mr. Marley, stopped coming. Emma, as we now learn, eventually realized something must have happened. It was the notes she missed, the birthday cards (Jake having a weakness for gaudy, rather corny greeting cards), and not the stock certificates. She was, after all, still a child. Not yet infected with greed.

  “Maybe she’ll never be infected with greed. Let’s hope so. And now, I’ll ask Mr. Webb to touch on a point of law. Bryan?”

  Webb got up again. “Mr. and Mrs. Driver will surely want to consult counsel on this. But Henry asked me to remind them that precedents exist. There are cases in which a minor divorces his or her own parents.”

  He started to sit down, thought better of it, and added, “I can supply the appropriate citations, of course.”

  Then he sat.

  Wow! You should have seen Dick and Nicole. But before they could say a word, Rousselot again took the floor.

  “If Emma’s parents have a scintilla of good sense, they will stop this endless bickering and costly litigation and work out a simple custody-sharing agreement. One month each summer with each, a third month visiting here with Sis Marley, learning to sail and catch fish, the rest of Emma’s year to be spent at the convent in Geneva, with Mother Superior acting in loco parentis. Meanwhile, Ms. Marley, Mr. Webb, and myself will continue as trustees.”

  I don’t believe I should here reveal what Mr. Rousselot told us about Emma Driver’s precise worth or the number of shares she holds through the foundation, except to say that by rough calculation, Emma is now the twelfth largest shareholder in Microsoft. And by other reckoning, pending further rulings by federal judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, she is the eighty-first richest American.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Jake and Brett are perfect together, always having cocktails and meeting bullfighters …

  It was our last night together, and we were glad of the respite. No Dick and Nicole Driver, disputed cemeteries, Sister Infanta de Castille, Reds Hucko, Nuncio, Professor Wamba, or the rest. We were passing a quiet evening at home before the great fire in the Admiral’s book-lined den.

  “Beecher,” said Emma.

  “Yes?”

  She looked up from my father’s bearskin rug, where she lay on her belly, elbows propped, reading one of her bibles, The Sun Also Rises.

  “Weren’t you disappointed when Jake Barnes didn’t marry Lady Ashley?”

  “More properly, Emma, it’s ‘Lady Brett.’ The title was her husband’s, not hers.”

  She gave me a look. “To be sure, Herr Oberst, absolument. But getting back to why they couldn’t get married, huh?”

  “I dunno. There were … problems.” Not wanting to say more, I left it at that.

  “Yes, I know. His wound and all …” She broke off then, only to resume:

  “ … and you’ve been wounded as well. The Admiral said so. In a place where it didn’t hurt all that much.”

  My father started to protest this line of inquiry, but Emma was at the stage of answering her own questions and beat him to it.

  “I mean, Jake and Brett are really perfect together. Always having cocktails and going dancing and catching trout and meeting neat people like Count Mippipopolous and the bullfighters. I like Jake so much better than Robert Cohn or Mike Campbell. And I’m sure Brett did, too.”

  “Yes, as do most of us,” the Admiral threw in.

  “What’s an undischarged bankrupt, Admiral? Does it hurt?”

  “Only your credit rating,” he growled.

  Emma returned to me. To me and Alix, more properly. “I think of you and Alix a lot, Beecher. How you get on so well but you don’t get married, either. Even though you’re a newspaperman like Jake and like cocktails, too. Though I don’t know about Pamplona and the bullfights.”

  “Well, we think about it from time to time. At least I do,” I said, wondering if I were making a sap of myself being all this candid in front of an audience of those I loved.

  “I as well, on occasion, think of marriage,” insisted Alix, being a good sport.

  “But you keep going off,” Emma said. “Like Brett.”

  “There is that,” she conceded. “Though never with bullfighters.”

  The kid finally relented and gave us a break and said she thought when she were older, she’d like to be Brett Ashley. “You know, breaking everyone’s heart all the time and going dancing and not having to work or attend classes, but just sporting about and living in Paris.

  We were still mulling all that when Inga came into the den. “Callers, sir,” she informed the Admiral, an eloquently raised eyebrow conveying her assessment of the “callers.”

  Peanuts Murphy and a small delegation of Baymen.

  When they were ushered into the den in their boots and pea jackets, watch caps tugged off respectfully, the Admiral, who understood the distinctions between wardroom and fo’c’sle, exchanged a few words with Murphy to put him at ease, letting the Bayman himself set the pace. Finally, Peanuts spoke.

  “We’re here, Admiral, for the little girl, Miss Driver. We know how she spoke up for us with Sis Marley in the matter of the Old Churchyard, planting dead Baymen and such. And want her to know it was appreciated. So we brung along a kind of New Year’s gift, Christmas being well past. A sou
venir of the East End and its Baymen for her to take back over there to the Alps and all.”

  He was handed a brown-paper shopping bag by one of the other Bonackers and Alix shoved Emma forward toward where my father and the half dozen large men stood awkwardly, boots shuffling on the thick carpets.

  “It’s yours, Emma. They fetched it here for you,” Alix said quietly.

  “Why, that’s awfully nice of you, Mr. Murphy. But it was all Auntie Sis’s idea to bury Mr. Hucko. I only wondered aloud from time to time. She made up her own mind on account of she likes Baymen and doesn’t want her brother’s bones borrowed again.”

  Peanuts had his own view of that, recalling that Sis Marley hadn’t budged a damned inch on the question of cemetery plots until this kid showed. But in the holiday spirit, he said only, “Sure, sure, girlie. I know. But we brung this anyhows. Making you an honorary Bub. Which is what we call local people out here. And so you’ll remember this here Christmas in the Hamptons, okay?”

  As he held out the shopping bag to Emma, she asked eagerly, “Oh, do tell me what it is, je vous prie, mon capitaine, tell me, tell me!”

  What it was, was a pair of hip boots and a billed cap such as Baymen wore at sea when they weren’t sporting watch caps.

  “Probably they ain’t seen nothing like them hip boots in the Alps,” Peanuts remarked with a big grin.

  “I’m sure they haven’t. And the cap is handsome as well. The other girls and even the Brides of Christ will be totally floored.”

  “Hucko would of been here, too. But he was, well, he ain’t feeling so good.”

  “Hungover,” offered one of the other Baymen pleasantly. “We closed Wolfie’s last night.”

  “Quel dommage,” Emma said, “probably took a chill on the Russian trawler. Or while he was in the net with halibuts and the sharks biting him.”